29^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Anna Świrszczyńska

Poland

Anna Świrszczyńska, also known as Anna Swir, was born in Warsaw in 1909 and died in Kraków in 1984. She published her first poems while still a philology student. This Polish poet and playwright’s main themes are the female body, motherhood, and her experiences in the Second World War. During the German occupation of Poland, Świrszczyńska joined the resistance and worked a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. She is one of the best-known Polish poets of the 20^th century and was awarded with Commander’s Cross of Polonia Restituta.
A German translation of her 1974 cycle of poems Ich habe eine Barrikade gebaut (I Built a Barricade) was published in a bilingual edition for the eightieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. Anna Świrszczyńska creates a tableau of the Warsaw Uprising in 100 poems, which describe the complexity of this event in simple language. The poems in this cycle follow the development of the uprising, beginning with surprise, euphoria, and hope and ends with ruins and escape. Świrszczyńska counters the traditional heroic narrative of the uprising, creating instead a realistic and violent portrait, and she questions the point of the sacrifices and destruction.
In Leukerbad, her translator Peter Oliver Loew will present and contextualize her work.

Ich habe eine Barrikade gebaut. Budowalam barykadę. Bilingual edition. Poems. Secession 2024

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